Literary stylistics

Citation

Mahlberg M & Wiegand V (2020) Literary stylistics. In: Adolphs S & Knight D (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities. Abingdon, Oxon, p. 306–327. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-English-Language-and-Digital-Humanities/Adolphs-Knight/p/book/9781032569734

Abstract
Literary stylistics is an applied discipline that draws on a range of linguistic approaches, models and methods to study literary texts. In the digital age, stylistics has benefitted from the availability of digitised versions of literary texts. In this chapter, we deal with the contribution that corpus methods can make to the study of these texts. We focus in particular on the field that has become known as corpus stylistics. While inward-looking reflections on disciplinary developments are necessary, it is equally important to take an outward-looking perspective that enables greater dialogue between different research communities. Corpus stylistics, stylometry and the digital humanities more widely share an interest in digital approaches to text analysis, and there are clear similarities between the tools that these communities use to count words, explore their usage across texts and visualise the results. With our sample analysis, we illustrate how digital tools can be used to identify a range of textual patterns and meanings in fiction. We demonstrate how corpus methods (1) support the analysis of meaning that is created through repetition; (2) contribute to the understanding of conventional patterns in narrative; and (3) contextualise specific literary examples within general language use. Our examples are taken from nineteenth-century narrative fiction, retrieved via the CLiC web app, but the principles and methods that we discuss are applicable to both fiction and non-fiction, and historical as well as contemporary texts.